Sable Book 1 of Chaos Time (Chaos Time Series) (12 page)

The place was dark; the only light was red and coming off the wall lamps affixed to corner booths. Posters of past rock stars and thousands upon thousands of signatures—both famous and non—littered the walls.

Things changed, but also stayed the same.

The world was different. People were different. But like ants, they couldn’t help rebuilding. Within months the shiny new shops had morphed back into the shanty’s they’d been before. The humans were freaks now, but they were still humans with the same goals, hopes, and dreams.

This place was a beehive for groupies and rockers making the New Skid Row scene.

A sixth sense had him returning his gaze to a shadow in the corner of the room. A pair of bright gray eyes, a shade he’d never seen before studied him with the intensity of a laser light. He lifted his brow, letting whoever those eyes belonged to know they’d been made.

“’Bout time, Red,” he snarled when the druggie returned and handed him the warm bottle.

“That’ll be nine bucks.”

“Happy hour. Four bucks. Don’t try to screw with me.”

Finally he saw her feeling something as she panted with anger, “nine!”

A couple of faces turned, the barkeeper one of them, and he pointed at her. “It’s four bucks, Katy.”

“Nine,” she insisted and crossed her arms.

The barkeeper came around and hauled her by her ear, dragging her back screaming and snarling that she was gonna get her money.

“You want a fix. Don’t be stealing from my customers to get it, you nasty piece of trash. I gave you this chance, do it again, and you’re fired,” his words brooked no argument.

She threw his arm off and began to transform. She got skinnier, tall like a reed. Her head came to a point, her arms becoming insectoid looking. They hung well past her knees, fingers divided up into five digits with long hooking nails that might as well have been claws. Foam dripped white and frothy from the slit she’d once called her mouth.

This time when she swiped at the bartender, her nails sliced through his midsection, severing him in half. The smell of blood overwhelmed. Large round tusks emerged from either side of her nose, splitting through the skin.

The smell Slayde found repulsive must have been ambrosia to her, because she fell on him like a rabid animal.

Her slurping chilled him to the marrow. Even the lifeless expressions of the drug induced recognized the brutality of her attack.

He might have done something...if he cared. But everyone on the streets knew if you wanted to live past twenty, you looked the other way. Always.

A small shape whizzed past like a blur of shadow and then gray eyes was staring down the weird amalgam of walking stick and wart hog.

“You should stop that now.” The girl was young, very young, with thick hair and large sloping eyes. She seemed too young and fragile to stand up to that...thing.

But looks were deceiving, because her voice carried like the roll of thunder through the quiet room.

Baldy’s long tongue came out and licked blood off her chin. Smothered in it, all it did was smear it worse. Her laugh echoed with haunting undertones. The sound of it made his arm hairs stand.

An unwelcome sensation began to fester inside him, one he hadn’t felt in years and it pissed him off, made his gut burn and his brain seethe. He cracked his knuckles.

Gray eyes didn’t move, her nostrils flared...barely. He probably only noticed because for some reason he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.

“What are you gonna do about it, tiny?” The creature’s voice was like maggots rolling on raw meat. He shuddered.

The girl clenched her fists with a look of supreme concentration on her face. The bald bug didn’t seem to notice or maybe even care, as if feeling she was the big bad wolf and nothing could touch her.

He smelled the smoke before he saw the fire, it all happened so fast he could barely process what he saw. One second she was a gangly, awkward girl, the next she was engulfed in fire. A literal walking flame sparking red and gold.

Then she screamed. The sound was pain. So much pain. It swept through his body like shards of jagged ice dipped in acid. He pressed his palms to his ears, desperate to dull the agonizing sound ripping through his brain. He couldn’t stop the convulsive shudder that tore down his spine.

The bald bug dropped to her knees. Drops of blood welled from every pore.

Chaos ensued, the other occupants screamed and tried to get away. Some couldn’t move, could only moan and clutch at their heads. But no one bled like baldy.

The shriek ended as quickly as it’d begun and with it the pain. Though his ears still rang. He took a shaky breath, trying to regain his equilibrium. When the flame cleared a bird, easily twice the size of the bug stepped out. Black eyes swirled with rings of silver and dots of snow white light. She kicked out her foot, dropping bug girl the rest of the way to the floor.

The creature was moaning, rolling under the heavy clawed foot and grabbing her face. Halfway between normal and freaky, she was shifting back to human and it must have been that shift that stopped the giant red bird from the final killing blow. Her talons were curled, inches from the neck, but she seemed hesitant. Her large head swiveled back and forth, as if seeking to understand the situation. Unlike bug girl, this one reeked of power and yet seemed completely unaware of it.

He hadn’t even realized he was walking toward her until he was beside her, pulling the nine from his book bag. Up close she was even more magnificent. Her feathers were a red hue so deep they rivaled the gleam of the brightest ruby. He’d never seen anything as terrifying, or as beautiful.

Her large head swiveled toward him, alien intelligence gleamed dark but sure in their depths. She squawked, but this was not the keening banshee wail that’d made him want to fall prostrate to his knees earlier, this was a short burst. Almost like a question.

“I’ll kill it.” He held his hand up and repeated himself, “I’ll do it. I’ll kill it.” Not once did he question how out of character he was acting. It wasn’t that he wanted to help; it was that he
had
to.

The bird blinked, then did that crazy head swivel thing again and like a giant dog ruffling its fur, stepped back from the moaning mass on the floor.

The creature looked awful. Her nose was gushing blood and her eyes were pure red, like every capillary had burst. Soaked in piss and sweat, she stank of terror and fear.

“Don’t...kill...me,” she stuttered with lips turning blue. “Just...need...ver—”

The explosive boom of the pulled trigger reverberated through the now empty bar. He’d shot a crimson pulse of his power through the barrel of the gun. It entered her heart like a harpoon, running through her veins with an electrical surge. It shorted her heart flat.

A small hiss had him turning his head and then he jumped when the bird erupted in a nova ball of flames. He shielded his eyes, but oddly the flames that burned with magma force intensity—he knew because the plastic cushions on the chairs beside her now dripped a black puddle on the floor—rubbed along his skin like the tender caress of a lover’s finger.

Gray eyes—but that was wrong, her eyes weren’t the dreary gray of smog, but the brilliance of a smoky pearl gleaming with luminescent lavender—replaced the bird. Eyes that he couldn’t seem to stop staring at were piercing him with barely disguised annoyance.

“I could have taken her,” she said so low he’d barely heard it.

His mouth tipped and he nodded, feeling the strangest desire to protect her fragile ego.

“You must be, Slayde,” she muttered, “figures it’d be you.”

“Who’s asking?” he asked, suddenly leery. He owed a lot of bad people a lot of money, money they were never getting back. Period. It was his fair and square. He’d fight to the death to protect what was his, even if bird girl was one helluva scary fighter.

***

Sable licked her lips, anxious and uncomfortable. It was one thing to dream of a hot guy who you felt you’d live and die for. It was another to come face to face with him.

Her visions of him from her dreams were vague, incomplete snippets of face and eyes. Her heart fluttered and she swallowed hard, fighting the urge to press her hand against the tide of moth’s wings flying with chaotic dips and dives inside her stomach.

Dark brown hair shot through with threads of deepest, midnight red. Eyes so blue they gleamed like cut glass, but when he’d manifested his crazy bolts of red power they’d turned the purest white of freshly fallen snow. There was a smattering of freckles along the bridge of his nose that might have made someone else look child-like, but there was nothing about him that screamed boy. This was a man, and he was staring at her with a mixture of confusion and barely leashed hostility.

Why did he have to be so hot? At this moment she really hated Hunter. Especially because saying someone was bonded sounded so ridiculous. Until she’d started to walk past the bar and had the most overwhelming and overpowering urge to come inside. When she’d seen him, she’d known. It was
him
. No doubt about it.

Her life was such a freaking mess.

She balled her hand into a tiny fist and thumped it repeatedly against her thigh. “So um,” she squeaked and blood crept up her neck, her ears were hot and she knew she was blushing something terrible, “you need to come with me,” she finally blurted out miserably.

He snorted, glaring at her openly now. “Did Broderick send you? Well screw you and him. Deal was forty/sixty. He knew that going in and...”

She shook her head, confused and flustered and she really wanted to rip Hunter a new one. Did he really think she’d be able to pull this off?

“Peace,” Slayde muttered, dropping his gun back into his book bag and shrugged it on. He turned on the heels of his shiny yellow doc martins and walked away.

She bit her lip, staring at the pile of guts and bits of body parts and she gagged. What the hell had that thing been anyway? What kind of place was this? It didn’t look at all like the Earth she’d known. Was this an alternate realm Hunter had mentioned?

She didn’t want to be here alone. She could protect herself, but she hated being alone. She looked up to see the black tail of Slayde’s trench coat flap behind him when he turned out the entrance and down the sidewalk.

“Wait!” she yelled after him, sliding on a puddle of sleek nasty bits and scrabbling for purchase on the pitted wood floor. She got outside as he was rounding the corner. “Wait, Slayde. I’m not...I’m not—”

He turned wearing a scowl on his face. His forehead furrowed with lines of anger. Quicker than she could track, he had his gun aimed back at her. “Don’t follow me,” he warned, “I’ve killed younger than you.”

She stopped on a dime, holding up her hands in a defensive posture. She heard the truth in his words and saw it scrawled on his face. He’d kill her and she’d seen what he could do. The power of that red stuff was scary.

It dawned on her that it was the middle of the freaking day here, the sun at its zenith in the sky and he had a gun aimed square at her with no fear of being caught doing it. What kind of place was this? Where was she? When was she?

“What year is this?” she finally asked. Her heart thudded so loud it sounded like gunshot in her head.

He blinked and his gun tipped down. It was now aimed at her foot. She took a ragged breath, feeling somewhat relieved by that.

“What?” he asked. “Who are you?” The gun was still tipping down, now barely dangling from his hooked finger. But the way he handled the weapon she knew she couldn’t afford to feel too comfortable. That gun was like an extension of himself, and could and would be up and aimed unswervingly back at her heart within a fraction of an instance if she so much as sneezed.

She licked her lips. “My name is Sable Ray and...” Was she really doing this? Would he even believe her? She hadn’t believed Hunter? “I need you to come with me.”

Yup, she’d known it. Like a skittish colt, that gun was back up before she’d even managed to blink. The cold look back on his face.

“I...I don’t know who Broderick is, never met him or seen him in my life.”

Funny how a brain works. Because at that moment she should be feeling terror at the possibility of being nothing more than gray matter smeared on the hot concrete beneath her feet. Instead all she could focus on was a sudden overwhelming itch in the middle of her back that she desperately wanted to scratch.

“Who sent you?” he asked, but this time she could swear it held less venom.

“His name is Hunter Gray.”

He scratched the side of his face with the muzzle of his gun and her eyes almost bugged out. She knew it wasn’t loaded, but still. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“What year is this, Slayde?” she tried again, maybe if she could say something to convince him she was telling the truth. Whatever that truth was, even she was having a hard time dealing with all this.

“Twenty-twenty four.”

“The hell?” she breathed before she could censure herself, “Where am I?”

Now he really looked confused and again those unbelievably gorgeous eyes were narrowing; and why was she suddenly so aware of his every minute detail? Who cared if he had nice eyes, he had a freakin’ gun aimed at her! What was wrong with her that she really didn’t care? Was she that jaded that reality no longer registered?

She sighed. “Look, I’m not crazy and if you’d put that stupid gun down I could maybe convince you of that.”

He glanced at the gun and the way he looked at it, it was creepy weird how she could almost read his thoughts. Like some part of her knew him so well she could tell verbatim what he was thinking.

She’s crazy. Can I trust her? Should I? I should leave. But...
(he looked at her, chewing on his bottom lip and her heart did that crazy thumping thing again and she shifted on the balls of her feet)
there’s just something about her
.

Okay, so maybe that conversation was totally what she wanted to hear, but she still felt a flood of warmth at the final thought.

“Fine,” he grumbled and shoved the gun back into his bag. “Have you eaten yet?”